A tour of Badby

1 The Bake House: If you took your Sunday dinner to him he used to light the oven and put it in and he used to charge one
old penny and it was first come first served as once the oven were full that was it. You had to take it back in your tray and
have your Sunday Dinner on Monday. That was in my Grandmother’s time.

3 That’s where The Red Lion was, up there. The Red Lion must not be forgotten. Most people don’t know that there
was a fourth pub in the village, right up the top of the village, more or less opposite the church. The Red Lion closed in
the late 1800s. It hadn’t got a proper bar. If you went in you could see it was a pub. You had like Bitter and Malt and the
old boy used to bring a big jug in straight out of the barrel and when it got to about 11 o’clock at night you just had to
have what was left on the bar.

4 This here is where Warner’s Coal Yard used to be and round about just there is where the old water tank used to be ‘cos
there was a wind mill down there you know like the American type they used to have.

12 The Goat House: That tinned roof building there was the old slaughter house and the wheel for pulling the beasts up
with is still in there and there was a well there. It’s not very deep they reckon, but it was that wide that you could turn
a horse and cart in it. He needed a lot of water for his business.

13 That house there - Park House, it was Jack Jones house and his wife was a teacher at the school, little kids like the
reception kids, and she looked like Lady Penelope out of Thunderbirds with bouffant hair. Blonde it was. Jack sold the field
for Park Close to be built.

15 Where them cottages are now, just slightly back, there was an old barn called Parrott’s barn. That used to be the
Granary. It was set a lot further back than what it is now and that was part of the Manor.

16 There’s a cottage just there where this garage is here now, called Rose Cottage. I’ve got a letter addressed to ‘Rose
Cottage, High Street, Badby’ because my father’s father lived there. It burnt down in 1957.

17 This is the entrance to The School just here. This part here with the little windows was the girls’ changing room and
for little kids. The other side, which is a mirror image, was boys but that was the bigger boys. There were three (school)
girls from Fawsley. Every Monday morning, they used to strip those girls off put them in a pair of shorts and put them in the
bath and wash them. There was a lad - similar thing, put him in the boys’ cloakroom and give him a bath. When you got to sort
of 10 or 11 years old the boys used to have to carry buckets of coal down for the boiler down the brick steps.

18 This is not Chapel Lane. From there up to the Gate House it’s Clarks Lane. From the gate house to the top of the hill
before you go down the dip to the cross roads, it’s Markham’s and down at the bottom it’s Tichburn.

19 The Gate House: A chap that used to live there was a man called Nobby Hill. He was the Woods Man. If they were hunting
there tomorrow, tonight he would be coming and filling the holes in. He was an amateur taxidermist. I went in there. He’d got
stuffed owls, magpies. He’d got Foxes’ brushes hanging up everywhere. In a glass case he’d got a beautiful vixen. He put it
like it were grinning at you.

20 This brick building - there used to be a copper in there and old Newport was in there and he used to boil his potatoes
up in there. It had a chimney. A lad I knew thought he was Father Christmas and if it wasn’t for someone who was coming back
from his garden and heard him he would have been very stuck in the chimney. He was about 10.

21 From there along that track, right, there’s a bridge at the end isn’t there? That’s called Brookside from there. You
used to come through here. You had to jump over the brook, right and that footpath was cut off when they built the Glebe. It
got overgrown and it used to go to the church. You could actually walk from the Church to the Chapel.

22 The Glebe: That there was green fields -all marshy down there, because when we were kids that used to be our motor bike
track. Years ago you got a lot of people, cos’ money was tight they used to have a motor bike and when things got a bit better
they used to be able to afford to buy a car and you didn’t want a motor bike no more. And we used to buy them for about £2.
I’m going back about fifty years now and that used to be our dirt track there.

23 Footpaths: The old boys used to walk either to Fawsley or to the railway at Woodford, as Woodford, if you walk across
the fields, is not as far away as you think it is, because you come out at Preston Capes and cut across the fields again.
When they used to come out the woods they used to bring a faggot of sticks with them. You want to walk it- you bring your
faggot! You don’t bring your faggot – you’re not getting on it and they used to get quite volatile about this. They used to
bring a faggot of sticks and as you walked back you lay them down in front of you and of course if everybody’s doing it, you
make yourself eventually a hazel green-type path.

24 Vicarage Hill: These houses used to be some cottages but they were set back further than where they are now. That was
where the Church Hall was. It was a red brick building and it got knocked down sometime in the mid-sixties. The Village
Institute it was called. The school used to do the Church Harvest sale there. You could rent it for wedding receptions etc.
Those cottages at the bottom there were called the Co-op cottages.

25 Out the back of the Vicarage was the terraced Vicarage Garden with some stone steps and a tennis court. Mortimer did
that. The other side of this hedge is where the ice house was in the garden behind the Vicarage which had snakes in it to
kill the rats. The ice wasn’t for you, it was for the Vicar. The vicarage land went right down to the row of trees down there.
Where the Glebe is, that field belonged to the vicarage. There used to be stables there and there was a groom’s cottage.

26 The Vicarage had a wide hall with a piano, study with another piano, dining room, kitchen, scullery, an empty classroom,
lounge and two floors of bedrooms. The rooms were huge and there was a bell system and little bedrooms for the servants at
the top, but only one staircase I believe.